You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. We just don't give about what other people think. Yeah, sure. We're polite. We're empathetic. We're kind people but at the end of the day when it comes to our lifestyle and the way that we live, we don't live our lives for what other people will think of us. And I think that's super interesting. I know you, you certainly don't live that way and you know, for any of you guys who know me or any of the stuff that I've done, I certainly don't live that way and it's even more ironic the ironic thing about that is that I'm married to a publicist whose entire job is to worry about what people think.

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Well, I started studying this when I was like 15 years old through cognitive psychology. And of course, the handwriting analysis, which I'm famous for and one of the first things that I learned was that being sensitive to criticism, caring too much, what people thought was a flaw and it was a physical pain in your chest of like someone not approving of you. And I had that as a kid. I remember having the members-only jacket and I'm dating myself. But like I cared, whether I had a certain jacket. And when I made these changes to my brain, I just didn't give anymore. And I think I probably overcompensated by not giving a. Quote-Unquote like all the best-selling books, these days and I kind of became an a-hole but I was an aggressive successful, and I got what I wanted a lot.

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Is it true that you cut the cards in your living room for the first thousand games? Is that a true story? Yes close. So we did a thousand games was our test market and we had some assembled them by hand. Well, the one problem we had was just before our launch, the printer screwed up and sent us the wrong cards. And they were 500 cards per game at a thousand games. With 500000 cards when they were supposed to come sorted game a game of 500 cards, they came completely wrong. So we had to hand sort.... you're laughing man. It was like oh! I thought it was I have admitted. It's the only tantrum I ever threw. I mean, the printer calls me up. Can't get it done. I launched the phone but we had to figure it out and it would be like and the math is 9580 playing card decks of playing cards.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahiin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Seriousness is a disease. It is not a quality to be admired. Whenever you look at people that are like super tight and they're sphincter as wound up, super tight and they're just very serious about things. There's something else in their life that's imbalanced. You look at the great people in history. I guarantee you they had rip-roaring laughs. You look at Albert Einstein, you look at John Rockefeller, you look at any of these people throughout history. They reach these incredible heights of success and you'll find antidotes of them being funny. Mark Twain is a great example of it. Oscar Wilde is another example of it. Alan Watts, you look at any of these great people throughout history. They didn't take themselves seriously. It's only the that take themselves seriously.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. So by the time I was 15, I was like, man, I got to get out of here. I can't. If I stay here, you know, What's the path for me? And my folks would say, hey, you know, go to school five years ten years to get a degree. Become a doctor. You become a doctor young man, and I'd be like all right. Well, let me look at the doctor. I'd be like, look at Mr. so-and-so out the street and I'd look at the guy and he was bald and fat and the whole family was bald and fat. And you just look at the guy and I'd be like, wow. Yeah, he's got a Benz, but that's not him, the bank owns it, right? And that could be you, right? Yeah, you look at his car and you're like, man, you know, like his house. You're like the bank owns that and the guy leaves at 5 a.m. He comes back at like 8 or 9 p.m. and now he looks miserable. I don't want to be that.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Treat everyone right and nice regardless of where they're at in their life, because of this guy and the agent, there could have been opportunities there. But you know what? Regardless of whether it's a guy parking your car or anyone else in your life. They're there for a reason and a season. And you treat everyone with respect and dignity. You never know where they're going to be, or what they're going to be. And certainly, he probably regretted by the way. I was in the copier business so I know the hum and I know the warmth. That was my first business. So I get that and I fell asleep a few times also good. That was working the 12 hour days but what an amazing story.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. There's another story where while I was you know, living in these abandoned buildings and on the beach and all these places, I managed to get myself a job at a copy place, at a Kinkos copy. It was at the time and I remember we were in the back. I was making photocopies for Scientology because that's it was right next to the Scientology building. Yeah, they would have these like, billionaire contracts that they made. People sign and like there was all this paperwork and I'd be like send the copy machines. I was a kid and I remember that I had this boss who was like this evil man like he was like the monopoly guy. He was like you know, he had this like a cat and a cane and a mustache and all this stuff and I would sleep behind the copy machine because it had a nice droning hum. It was warm back there and I could sleep for a few hours so during my shift. I would set the papers, the contracts to print and I would fall asleep behind the copy machine. Didn't think much of it, but one day I woke up and like to a kick in my side and like his like cane and he's like standing on something beating me behind the machine and me looking going hey, what the man and you know, him like kicking me out. I didn't get my paycheck, right? Mind you, I was sleeping in wherever I could sleep. I didn't have money for food. He wouldn't give me my paycheck.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. My dad worked at a pizza shop and then he worked at a dry cleaner for nearly 30 years. And we never bought new clothes. I hadn't been to a restaurant until I was 15. And you know, then one of the rich kids at school invited me over and I remember going, wait for a second, explain to me how this works again. This guy is going to come and give me a piece of paper and I can pick a hamburger and he will bring it to me. Like, I was like, yeah, get whatever you want. I got my dad's card. I said what? What do you mean? Did you get your dad's? I go, wait. He's like just get anything you want. I'm like, "so I can get a hamburger and the pasta. I can get both of those and he's going to bring them to me." I was like you must be bullshitting. I don't believe you. And you know, that was my level of sophistication. At that time. I had no, we didn't buy new clothes. It was when customers would come and somebody would look cool, we would just cross our fingers and hope they would skip out on their bill. So my dad would keep their clothes and somehow it would trickle down to us. All our clothes were like two-three sizes too big for us.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyenne and his co-host Bart Baggett. I discovered all the great inspirational writers during the turn of the century. People like Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie's. I read the bio, I read you know people like Og Mandino, all these great, old-time, Did you like? Did you read the thinking where rich was that instrumental or? I did read Think and Grow Rich and I think it was it was pretty inspirational for me, you know, I'm not sure I agree with all the concepts in it now but back then it was exactly what I needed and I started reading up on that stuff. I started reading up on the New Age Movement. The self-development movement reading, Tony Robbins, and all these great people. And I was like, man, you know there might be a chance for me. So I took off.

At that time, Richard, there was a drug called Ecstasy or MDMA, one of the most popular drugs. It was outlawed in the United States. It was scheduled, I believe sometime in 1983- 1985, sometime in the 80s. Ecstasy was banned. It went underground, was made illegal and what happened was that this particular drug was very difficult to synthesize. So the supply mostly came from outside the US, Europe and because of the whole Reagan say no to drugs era, you know, the Nancy Reagan say no to drugs period. They were cracking down and the supply had dried up. They had put a stop to drugs coming into the United States. The drug dealers were out of drugs and the people who wanted them couldn't get them. So there was a huge demand but very little supply.

Uh, Walter Isaacson, who wrote the great uh autobiography, sorry not autobiography, the great biography of Steve Jobs talks about how Steve Jobs would walk into a room and he would say, all right guys, uh we're going to need and this was in the early 90s. We're going to need a phone and you're going to be able to touch the screen. Before this, all phones had buttons and there'll be no buttons on this phone and it'll do all these things. It'll have an iPod on it, it'll play music, it'll do all these things. It didn't exist and the engineers would say okay cool, Steve Jobs awesome. Okay, amazing. We could have this for you in the next three to five years. He'd be very cute. 30 days I'm going on stage to announce it. Make it work and he would leave and they would all be sitting there going oh my god what an and what just happened. We just agreed to do this and they would do it and he would make it happen.

A friend of mine used to say wealth is better made quietly and I learned that the second and third time around, believe me, I learned that after making hundreds of millions of dollars and losing hundreds of millions of dollars and having to reinvent myself several times over. I learned that it's better that way. And, you know, the people that have the real wealth, you might not ever even hear about them. They're not out there, you know, shining the shiny things or chasing the shiny things because they're too busy making money.

Look, all this stuff that we're talking about is formulaic. There's a formula to persuasion, there's a formula to influence there's a formula to sales, but there's no formula for being a real person, there's no formula for authenticity. And at the end of the day, nothing sells better. I don't care what it is pills, houses, cars, than just being an authentic person.

It's true. There's no participation prize in the real world. There's no participation prize on Amazon, you don't get an honorable mention for having good intentions. So you have to go out there ready to crush and if you can't handle that, get a job, go work for someone and sell or be a socialist. There are plenty of countries that would love to have you as a socialist, you know, and I know there's a whole political movement of like, oh, everybody should be free and give the money away and feed the homeless and you know what? Get three kids and start an Amazon business. See how socialist you are? You won't be that socialist once you have written your checks. Go read Ein Rand the fountain header atlas shrugged and let's see if your philosophy doesn't change a little bit.

So you have this money being pumped in from wall street billions of dollars that need to be deployed. I learned from the many companies that I've had and from raising several rounds of investment and various companies that I've had that investors don't like money sitting around. Once they invest in you, they want that money to go to work like little soldiers marching off to war. They want to deploy.

So I was looking through these and so there's a lot of brokers around the country you get on their email list and I'm just like which one of these can we take on amazon because most of these are crap businesses that I wouldn't want to own. I'm sorry that they built them for 20 years and they're going to go down the tubes but it's good because I was able to look at the earnings, look at the language, start understanding how people buy and sell businesses and that's not an area that I was familiar with more than three years ago. So that's something very interesting which helps you understand you're building an asset whether it's a house or whether it's a product and you make it sell that asset and walk away That to me is exciting about the amazon platform.

The most important thing is being visible. So to be visible what we call ranking, you show up on that first page. When you search for I don't know uh pie cutters and go on to that first page of amazon when you click through, there are about 10 or 20 items on that page. That is golden real estate. There might be 2000 products, there might be 20000 products, but whoever is on that first page has it. Whoever's got the number one listing that's gold. So amazon discovered hey, I know how we're going to get up there. It's going to catch 21 catch 22 English not so good. Um, so whichever catch it is and what they did was they designed their algorithm so that the more sales you have the higher you rank.

You know what I would tell anyone and what I do. I speak a lot to students and what I tell them on the front end is you know regardless of how well you do, how good you are. How successful you are. It's a million percent. There are going to be losses along the way. So I think going into fighting, going into any sort of life or business, just that awareness of all right, I'm going to do the work, I'm going to train, going to prepare, I'm going to develop the confidence, but I do know that I could lose.

But rather that they've known themselves they understand themselves that they understand their strengths and they understand their weaknesses and they've come to a place of reconciliation with who they are no. They know that purity rubs off on a person. Yeah, people like if you meet somebody like that you just can't help but want to help.

It's I know exactly that burn the ship's mentality, the focus, the clarity and the like you said purity you know what I mean. It creates like there's like um I think I think what it is is you know when you have that there's no safety net, there's no plan B and it just becomes like right.